Fast Fiction

I did a few words this evening. Two hours, 1829 words. I’m not setting the world on fire. I ended up surfing around the web a bit. I found a great site for info about counterfieting. I was surprised at how many questions it answered for me. I’m getting a better handle on my Secret Service Agent character, Gregory Conklin. And I think I’m finding a way to put a little humor into the whole thing. Which will make it all much more bearable.

I’m not able to resist the editing thing. I go back and tinker with things. Thankfully I haven’t hacked anything else out since day two.

So, I’m at 7,988. I wanted to break 8,000 tonight, even though it means that I’m still behind. But tomorrow is a work at home day, so I may be able to get some stuff done while I upload.

The big thing was tonight I finally posted an excerpt on the NaNoWriMo site in my profile. I’d been resisting. I don’t know why. It’s not like we all have great expectations about our work we’re doing. I just don’t want folks to look over that particular block of text and start to wonder why they were in my company ... must reinforce, it’s the fact that I am fearless enough to not only post the excerpt, but the whole damn thing so far over there. Yeah for courage!

Day five is beginning and if you look to the left, you’ll notice that I haven’t written anything since Sunday.

Well, I have written, just not on my novel. I had to do a rewrite of a monologue for rehearsal. And in general, 1,400 words would not normally take me that long, but these had to be 1,400 good words, so that kind of ate up the morning.

Today is one of my “go to work” days, so that makes working on the novel so much harder. I’m going to take the file with me and try to keep it open in another window, but I don’t have the greatest faith that I’ll be able to multitask that well.

Maybe I’ll just post more here later.

This morning I got up early. Not really on purpose, I just woke up rather early and then, well, didn’t go back to sleep. Then I decided to go out and get some new headphones for my laptop to use while I’m writing (I’ve loaded about two gigs of MP3s onto the hard drive already). This is really a nice thing to have. So I loaded up all of my stuff and headed over to the Bourgeois Pig in Hollywood. I met up with three other wrimos. The good thing was that I was the first one there. I staked out an excellent table and got in about 1,000 words before the first one showed up.

The other cool thing was that even though there were four of us sitting at the table, all of us had in earphones, so the temptation to talk was slightly reduced and therefor productivity enhanced. That’s not to say that there weren’t several hours wasted on that socializing thing ... well, I wouldn’t call them wasted. I quite enjoyed it.

I had a bit of a breakthrough ... or maybe a red herring, but it was good territory to mine as I’m getting to know my secondary protaganist (Gregory Conklin). I’m having a little trouble getting into the meat of the story as I struggle to “set things up” in some satisfactory way and I’m still editing as I go. But if I continue at this rate, I’ll still make it in time and perhaps end with a better first draft than last year.

I’ve posted the 15 pages that I’ve got there on the link with my word count. That PDF file will evolve (in case you’re reading this in the archives) into the full draft as the month goes on.

Well, as I thought would happen, I have gone ahead and started editing my novel before I even get into it. Though I hate the prologue at the moment, I am keeping it, with the understanding that whenever I am blocked or feeling like I need to do some research or something before continuing, I can at least go back and work on that.

I deleted everything else that I did yesterday. So I started today at 517 words. I’m now at 2,968. Not entirely bad. I’m posting my word count chart thingy here: cybelestatus.xls. It’s not really that big a deal yet. But it will be.

Here’s a handy tip. If you don’t want to make your word count goals, go to a great coffee house and try to write with your best friend.

At least I’m not able to do it very succesfully. Maybe as my priorities shift later in the month from important things like relationships to these trivial goals like finishing a book in a month. Then I’ll be able to blow off the guy sitting right next to me.

I’m thinking this writing out in coffee houses this November is not going to help me much. It was great last year because I didn’t know anyone. But this year I’m the frickin’ Municipal Liaison and I’ve now personally emailed everyone in the Los Angeles Basin.

The good news on the goals front though is the fact that I had a little meeting with my boss yesterday morning and told her that I’m only coming into the office two days a week for the rest of the month and then one floating day a week when I’ll work from home. Jeeze, I love freelance!

Okay, I’ve got an hour before I have to leave for rehearsal. Maybe I can do some catching up.

So, I did that little jumpstart of writing last night. And instead of following my own advice and leaving off at a spot where I know where I’m going, I left off at the end of the prologue.

I went to bed thinking that I’d just start the novel in the morning. But then I thought, “How will the novel begin?” And I started writing in my head. For hours. Four hours. I probably should have just gotten out of bed and come downstairs and typed it out so I could sleep. But there you go, writing is not tiring, it’s energizing.

Kept me up until about 4.

I stayed up until midnight so I could at least do a little before bed. Then I could wake up and know that I at least had 500 words in the bag for the first day.

And that’s what I did. 516 words. And the encouraging part was that it only took me 15 minutes. At this rate, it’ll only take me another 23 hours. Well, maybe I can’t just sit and write for 23 hours straight and have the novel. I don’t think I know much about what happens after this. But I do have about eight hours before I have to think about it again.

If you’ve come here to read it, well, give me a day and I will start posting the ENTIRE thing over there on the left as a PDF file. Make sure you have Adobe Acrobat Reader. Should I post it as one file or break it up into chapters? Is anyone going to read this thing? Or am I just doing this to prove that I’m doing it?

Off to bed!

I’ve seen a lot of talk in places about writing habits. Some people seem to have it in their head that writers write. Writers are supposed to write every day. Writers are not any good unless they write every day for the rest of their lives. That sort of nonsense.

That’s what it is.

Writers are people and all people are different.

Writing is not a sport. It’s not like you can train for writing. It’s not like good writing involves special muscles any more than bad writing does. Being a strong writer has nothing to do with exercise. It has to do with thinking. Thinking is what makes you a good writer. (And sometimes not thinking makes you a good writer, too.) Writing is drawing connections between things, making combinations and then showing them to us.

I say all this mostly as a rationalization. I am a binge writer. I write in huge vomitous spurts (if that’s a legal phrase). I will go months, even years without writing anything substantial and then I will sit down and in a matter of hours pound out a one-act play or a draft of a full-length within a week. Or, in the case of November, I will write a novel.

I write when my brain is full. Writing is a way of containing ideas for later use by others. I’ll have an idea. I noodle on it. I read about things related to it. I observe things that help me solve problems in it. I develop it in my head and then eventually it’s done and has to come out. Now, I know that not everyone works like this. And by no means is the thing done in my head. I don’t know every word, I don’t even know what’s going to happen.

Think of it this way: writing is like baking. I’ve got this recipe. I’m not even sure what it makes, but I put all of the stuff in it. I see what I’m putting in it and sometimes I add other stuff (you know, raisins would be really good with this, and pecans ... maybe a bit of lemon zest). Then I mix and pop it in the oven. That’s the typing part. It bakes and I wait. I type, I give it a sniff now and then and eventually it comes out and there’s a draft. I just know it’s ready and I need to take it out of the oven and taste it. Then I know what it is.

So, for any of you out there who feel guilty because you don’t have umpteen journals lining your shelves and you don’t work on a schedule of “five pages a day”, take heart. You can be a writer. You do have to write, mind you. But you don’t have to feel like not writing isn’t being a writer either. Eventually you let it all out.

Editing is another matter.

Just a brief update on the whole knee thing. I went and got an X-ray (actually, four) and nothing’s broken. Well, I knew that I didn’t break anything. They knew that I didn’t break anything, but in order to get a referral from my HMO primary doctor to an orthopedic, I had to have an X-ray. Well, the orthoped doesn’t need the X-ray, because they know it’s not broken, what they really want is an MRI, but they can’t order an MRI until they see me. But before they order an MRI, they have to do an X-ray ... you can see where this is going.

Mostly, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time or precious radiation. But really, I must learn that’s not how modern medicine works. Hey, maybe I’ll work all of this into my novel anyway. I haven’t had an X-ray since I was nine and went to have my tonsils out (don’t ask my why I had to have a head X-ray for that… I recall that they couldn’t decide whether my ear infections were being caused by severe strep infections or a brain tumor ... go figure). This was less scary than that. And they let me keep my clothes on.

The silly result of all of this is that I still can’t get an appointment with an actual physician until the 30th. By then I’ll be completely healed and look like a real nutcase.

But hey, I got some cool pictures out of it! That’s really my patella there. My femur, my tibia ... am I revealing too much?

typ e?tive [ tai pEh tihv ]
adjective
inclined to excessive writing: tending to write readily and at length

also
- typ e?tive?ly adverb
- typ e?tive?ness noun

Usage note: typetive, a general and fairly neutral word for somebody who writes a lot, especially as a matter of disposition

Usage Example: “When Raina was feeling particularly typetive, her sister could get emails from her that were well over 2,000 words long.”

Thesaurus
Typetive (adj)
Synonyms: chatty, loquacious, verbose, garrulous, voluble, prolific, fluent, glib, conversational Antonym: reticent, brief

About two years ago I started living my life by a new philosophy. One that fits in perfectly with NaNoWriMo.

Basically, if you want to accomplish anything in your life, you’re going to have to start somewhere and you’re going to have to turn off that critic in your head that tells you things like, “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.” I’m not buying that anymore. My attitude is this: Make a list of the things you want to do and start doing them. Check them off. If you liked it the first time, then go back and do it again and do it well.

I wanted to write a novel. And I hoped to write a great novel. But let’s face it, even though I’m an experienced writer, chances were pretty damn good that my first novel was going to be rather weak. So why pour my soul into it? Why not get the first one out of the way and then either go back and rewrite it entirely or use that experience to go on and write a good novel?

I’m putting this into action in other areas of my life too. I’m in training (well, will restart the training after the knee heals) for the Los Angeles Marathon. I’m not even going to run it. I’m going to walk it. Which might sound like a cop out, but to walk a marathon takes about seven hours. That’s a commitment. And if I like it, maybe I will take up jogging and run it the next year. Or at least I’ll have my little medal and can tell folks that I wanted to be in a marathon, and I was in a marathon.

Lower your expectations. Broaden your horizons.

And I thought I was detail oriented.

It was on my list. I was going to create an excel spreadsheet to track my progress and create a little chart I could post and all. But someone done gone and beat me to it. Erik posted this thingy.

The scary thing is that I was so fascinated by it that I actually took all of my totals from last year and plugged them in to see how I did. Now, I know I finished. I finished a day early! Why would I need to plug last years numbers into the spreadsheet? I am such a pathetic nut sometimes. Anyway, as you can guess, the spreadsheet told me I finished. It gave me a swell graph and at the end of the month, my little pie chart was all one color because my novel was 100%.

As for an update on the whole knee thing ... well, it’s been five days and the dang thing still smarts. I don’t know why I got it into my head that I could just walk it off or something. But it’s getting better slowly. I’ll be working from home for the most part these next few weeks. So perhaps that means more frequent updates! Or additional complaining.

So, tonight I got my first experience at an emergency room as an adult. I’m afraid I watch too much TV and was quite disappointed to find it all rather civilized. I was in and out in about an hour and half. It’s the first time I’ve actually been grateful for my health insurance ... I actually specified this civilized hospital as my critical care of choice.

Anyway, I’ve been immobilized. Apparently I’ve blown out some tendons or something in my knee. And this doesn’t relate much to my noveling except for the fact that they said that I have to wear this dang knee brace for six to eight weeks. Somehow, I don’t see that happening. I see, maybe a week.

But I am going on vacation anyway. Gives me an excuse to snuggle down with a good book and order room service, eh?

It seems that many, many people are taking NaNoWriMo very seriously. Perhaps it is the fact that I know I can do it that I’m feeling a little cocky. I do have hindsight. But I also have this terrible problem of wearing these vision correcting rose colored glasses ... I forget that I must have struggled to finish. I look over some of my postings in my log and realize that I must have had trouble. I was 13,000 words behind on November 15th.

But I can’t imagine being “prepared.” Perhaps it’s the fact that I write from my brain and not from my notes, but I can’t have chapters and outlines. Maybe I could, but somehow I think that’d take all the fun out of it. What if I knew what was going to happen, I mean, really happen in my novel? What’d be the point. I like writing to find out.

I’ve got an idea, I’ve got questions and the only way to answer them is to start writing and let that figure them out for me. I think writing is really a computer. I input ideas and the act of writing solves them for me.

But again, maybe I’m not doing this the proper way. I’m amazed to see that people have so much done already. How can you name a chapter already? How do you know that you have 14 chapters in the first place?

Well, I’m not even going to think about it this weekend. I’m off on a trip up the coast and I’m going to shut off my writing brain and turn on my paddling and hiking brain.

Okay, I’ve been dicking around with the look of the blog for about a week now.

And you’re probably asking yourself, “Why the engraved design elements?” Well, my novel is supposed to have a large component about counterfitting. So, in order to inspire or remind me or whatever, I decided to give my blog a bit of a look to that effect.

What it has meant, however, is that I have spent hour upon hour on eBay looking at scans of money from around the world. Really. It’s quite addictive.

I’m thinking of having some illustrations for my novel as well. Perhaps picking portraits from currency for each of my characters. Would that confuse anyone? To see an engraved little picture of, oh, say Bernardo O’Higgins when I mention Dwight, the babyfaced Secret Service agent? Let me know if you think that’s a bad idea.

I thought it’d help me focus. Or be a total distraction.